Unpredictable

This sign was posted beneath the iPad-register at a bakery-café we went to yesterday with a friend. It's not original, I learned later, but no matter - it seeded our conversation in all sorts of ways. The obvious was the Great Resignation, and the compounding indignities of always demanding customer-facing service work. This led us to reflect on AI service workers, and how they might be shaping customers' expectations and behavior. Soon we were talking about Kazuo Ishiguro's Clara and the Sun, which I read over the break and the friend had started as an audiobook before stopping as it was breaking her heart. If you don't know it, it's narrated by a robot created to help children overcome loneliness as they approach adulthood, and the power of the book is as much in her story as in the way she describes the near sci-fi world she lives one. It's a world she only dimly understands or seeks to comprehend; she's programmed only to engage things that might help her in her caring task. Her dedication to that task of course puts unpredictable humans to shame...